Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

Tagging @tekoii @BruceCM @Vortexeo @Snatcher and @TheJGG for a delayed XC2 update:

• Some Indoline Monks were sent to give Rex and Co. a message: to use the Aegis's power to take out Torna's warship. Our party didn't exactly comply, and they didn't like taking "No" for an answer. I had to send these guys packing.
• Okay, now things are officially getting delightfully weird. Amalthus is a Blade Eater via Fan La Norne's core crystal; he can use his power to control both Blades AND Titans. He has a heck of a pull on all Blades and Flesh Eaters present and forces Pyra/Mythra to attack the Tornan Warship using the Artifice Siren. Rex, however, breaks free of Amalthus's control.
• This guy still isn't done. He begins summoning the Titans as well, causing them to attack the World Tree with energy blasts. Specifically Mor Ardain (End Chapter 8, Begin 9), Genbu (Tantal), and Uraya. Mor Ardain can't afford to expend much more energy....
• Mikhail sends Akhos and Patroka after Jin and Malos, then causes the warship to change into a Titan-sized robot that proceeds to whale on Indol. I feel kinda sorry for the Titan....
• Rex comes up with a plan to shut down Amalthus's control over the Titans. Getting to a higher vantage point took awhile. Powerful monsters like ganging up with everything else in the area; an intruding Lexos was a HUGE pain for awhile, but I finally broke through.
• Rex's plan using both Poppi and Mythra works. Amalthus isn't pleased and tries firing on Rex and Co. with Indol's Titan. But...Mikhail defends them, buying them time. Heck, he sacrifices himself!
• Mikhail's backstory is interesting. Turns out he's a Blade Eater, one who knew Lora (Jin's Driver) back in the day. His background reveals that Amalthus cares nothing for the refugees Indol takes under its wing. At least in Mikhail's day, it appears some refugees were used in Blade Eater experiments....
• My progress was thwarted, by all things, something that requires field skills I didn't quite have enough of. I did some side quests and raised my Merc rank while I worked on improving the Focus skills needed. Herein likes a complaint: So far, these were mostly optional for exploration and some side quests. I'm fine with that. However, I don't think these should be used to gate story progress....At least I finally unlocked the door and continued onto the next room before stopping.

@Snatcher I think the create a character feature added replay value to it. Trying to unlock outfit stuff for my avatar made me replay levels over and over.

@MarioLover92 Cool, I remember seeing Super Mario Run and Mario Kart Tour, I think there's a Fire Emblem one, funnily enough, I forget there's an Animal Crossing one. That's cool that's how your mom got into Animal Crossing.

You're welcome. I don't have too many Lego anything, but I do have some Lego Dimensions stuff, and I do have a nice Trolls set I got as a gift. It came with Poppy, had a swing set and the "Catterbus" from the movie series. Outside those, I haven't gotten Lego anything since I was a kid.

@Tyranexx Oh sweet, that'd be cool for you to share as well. Glad to hear you're enjoying yourself with the building process overall, best of luck on getting the rest of the build done! Been wanting that Lego set in particular, since I always loved Super Mario 64.

Yeah totally, games should indeed get harder as they go on. Yep, they've been around since the first game! There's a hammer in Super Mario RPG as well, though it's just a weapon you can equip. You have a great trip in advance - stay safe out there!

@Sunsy Ah yeah I played Fire Emblem Heroes as well. That was a decent game from what I've played. That's cool, and yeah, the SM64 set's the only Lego set I have now. Before that, when I was younger, I'd put together those sets that were vehicles, like that blue motorcycle and a car that was likely a red Ferrari, or something that looked similar to that.

Happy Valentine's day everyone!

I wish your love for gaming doubles this year!

@MarioLover92 he is not a fan of anything except dried worms

Yeah, the new demo for Triangle is much better, @Tyranexx .... You won't mind it being a bit 'story heavy', presumably? Glad to hear XC2 is still going well! I liked Origami King quite a bit, the battle system is a good balance overall & the story is great

Holy flurking schnit.

Have my US people seen this non-profit online pharmacy site started by Mark Cuban? https://costplusdrugs.com/ Is this real? If you don't want to click the link, you can google "mark cuban pharmacy". The story is, Mark Cuban started the non-profit to disrupt excessive prices of the US pharmaceutical market. Two drugs I take retail for $200-300, and $50 for a 90 day supply. He's selling them for $8 and $11. Strangely, even albuterol inhalers are still $30-40, those things have no business being over $10-15. Anyway, supposedly, they are continually expanding the drugs they offer, in case you can't find one on the site. (cough! Advair)(Non US people, advair inhalers are $300 USD)

Probably smart to avoid political commentary. The regulars here know, even objectively true unoffensive constructive statements can be like playing with matches in the forum. Sad, but true.

@WoomyNNYes i heard about this! I work in pharmacy and I think it's brilliant. I don't know how long his business model will survive but it's nice to see a company putting their patients first rather than their reimbursement rates.

Sorry for the late reply here! But hey, I'm glad you're still around! I was worried you just disappeared haha. But yeah the direct was SO GOOD! I can already feel like my backlog is going to increase exponentially haha 😅. As for the Skies of Arcadia Legends, I have heard of it but I have never played it myself. I just looked into it and it seems right up my alley! Maybe I'll give it a shot at some point lol.

@Tyrannex Man, you're making some good progress! I actually just started my new game plus playthrough for Torna! I very much agree with you on the field skills remark. I made a wishlist for Xenoblade 3, idk if you saw it but one of the things I put on there was that I hope field skills don't make a comeback. In Xenoblade 2 they weren't really implemented well at all.

Replying on a treadmill during my lunch, forgive any typos or grammatical issues.

@MarioLover92 Thanks! While I don't have any nostalgia for Super Mario 64, I did play the game on the Wii U virtual console a few years ago and quite enjoyed it. Not sure about this evening, but I should be able to make some progress tomorrow evening...maybe even finish?

Now while I'm not a Mario RPG vet by any means - working on it - I have played and beaten Super Mario RPG! It's easy to see where both the Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario series got some of their core ideas from. And on my trip: thanks! Definitely looking forward to it! It's been awhile since I've traveled more than one state away.

@BruceCM I've sat through all three Golden Sun entries, so I'm quite used to RPG waffling. XD Appreciate the feedback on my current and future gaming endeavors.

Heh, only heard about those, @Tyranexx .... Only you don't want to skip the dialogue in Triangle Strategy as there's various useful bits of info & story in it If you can speed read, you can ffwd like I did most of it....

Man I'm so glad I never cared about Sol Cresta. I already had massive skepticism from seeing the price (I'm pretty sure it was around the 4000 yen figure) and the erratic nature of the game kinda confirmed my suspicions. Honestly, the whole game felt like the result of one of Kamiya's fever dreams. It's interesting to see him explore a passion like this but treating it like an AAA game, from pricing to marketing, is silly. On the flip side it's nice seeing Horizon: Forbidden West do well review-wise, and that kinda went as I imagined too; great sequel but it's more of the same, and won't change the minds of people that didn't like the first game. I'll wait a few weeks or months to grab that, because believe it or not, even for a AAA PlayStation first-party game... I can wait.

@Tyranexx Precisely. I'm being a bit more conservative on collector's editions than most but it's for one's own good at the end of the day. I haven't ran into any scalping on my end, thank goodness, but it's a matter of time now, especially with hardware due to the insane chip shortages. I feel like I've bought nothing but open world RPGs over the last two or so years though, so getting into different kinds of games'll certainly be worth it. There's rumours Cyberpunk 2077 may get a native PS5 edition, though, so having bought the game for half price I'm making use of that.

As for XC2, it wasn't polished as much as I imagined, and can play pretty clunky at times, which is a reason why XC1's my preferred game there. It's probably a coincidence but my favourite games in that series came first, and 2's my least favourite (but considering how good the series is it's not an insult) as a result. It's nigh-on maddening X hasn't gotten ported yet. I may need to break out my Wii U just to play that game, if I get desperate.

The next few months are going to be CRAZY. I've never felt this kind of Nintendo-caused buzz for a while and I missed it.

Hope you all had a good Valentine's Day.

@Zuljaras Thanks, same to you! Oh, gotcha. I don't have any to give though - my apologies.

@Tyranexx Yeah no problem! Oh that's good you still liked it. I've finished Super Mario RPG as well, beat it on the Wii VC long ago. I finished all the Mario & Luigi games and most of the Paper Mario games too. The only ones I didn't beat were Sticker Star and Color Splash. Mainly because I didn't like SS, as I've said multiple times before, and I never got CS.

@Sunsy You'll like this. I watched The Princess and the Frog on Valentine's Day and I liked it! Love the songs in that movie, too.

Fun fact, today is Galileo Galilei birthday, on 15 February. Also, today is Cap Go Meh celebration as the 15th day of Chinese New Year when it will be Full Moon this night.

Just now, I was browsing images from Google image about Ninja Baseball by curiosity and accidentally I found something interesting.
I found a retro Arcade game with name Ninja Baseball Bat Man. The game was beat em up style with Ninja + Baseball player looking guys with baseball bat as their weapon. When I watched the gameplay video, it looked fun and very cartoonish. Take a look.

@MarioLover92 Cool, I think when I was younger, I had a couple of space themed sets where there were spaceships, and other futuristic sets, as well as a racing set with several cars, one of which said "Octane" on them. Nowadays, I don't usually get Lego sets, but it does make me happy to have a few character ones, as those never existed when I was a kid, and having some of them along with the Dimensions stuff.

Glad you saw Princess and the Frog, a Disney movie I don't see many talk about. Glad you like it.

@Sunsy
I knew about The Princess and the Frog by Disney. It has the saddest death scene of beloved folk (Death of Ray the firefly). I will drop my tears everytime I watched that scene.
Also, if you noticed Tiana, she was the first dark skinned princess from all Disney princesses.

Oh, I found something never before seen above.
I posted a gameplay video of rare Retro Arcade game from year 1993.

@Sunsy The movie was great (Princess and the Frog) but the singing was too much for me. When we are re-watching it sometimes we even skip the songs in THAT particular movie

The other classics like Aladdin, B&B and Mulan nailed the singing perfectly

I saw the trailer for the new Chip & Dale movie and I... Just... What?

@Eel It's a trip and a half, that's for sure.

I do like how tongue in cheek it is about Hollywood though, the whole 'CG facelift surgery' for Dale was admittedly pretty hilarious. There are just so many.... things that are just insanity though.

I feel like I've got to watch it when it comes out though.

@Anti-Matter @Zuljaras Nice to see others who seen it too, really I don't see it talked about much online so I get the feeling it's one of the more underrated or overlooked Disney movies.

That scene with Ray always gets me Anti.

That's fine Zuljaras, not every song is for everyone.

@Eel I saw this while doing some chores earlier. I'm surprised they brought that animation/live action style from Roger Rabbit back. Though, I did laugh at the Cats movie reference, lol (worth noting, I've seen the original Cats Broadway show live once).